Govt.

Back in October I was pretty certain that I was going to jail. There was a bench warrant for my arrest due to a missed court date. I forgot, that’s it. My wife was in the hospital, unable to speak. I’ll just say my mind was 100% focused on my wife, court was the last thing on my mind, unfortunately. Having your wife in the hospital for the third time in as many months becomes very anxiety inducing, lol.

Lucky Bastard

With the bench warrant out for me, I decided it was time to hire a lawyer. And FUCK was he an awesome lawyer (rather cheap, too). He explained to the powers that be that I had simply forgotten because my wife was in the hospital. He also brought to their attention that I had never missed any of my 5 prior court dates. Luckily the judge was lenient and cancelled the warrant.

My lawyer had a lot of good contacts, and even worked with the judge many, many years ago. After my attorney met with the prosecuting attorney, he told me everything I’d been wanting to hear. Prosecutors agreed for a deferred judgement, 6 months probation, and 50 hours of community service. The deferred judgment was the one I really cared out. The fact that my lawyer only charged me $500 was a major plus, too. He’s sort of a family friend, and the exact opposite of what you’d expect a lawyer to look “be”. He’d fit in really well at Burning Man. I liked him a lot.

Or Not So Lucky

The whole ordeal turned out to be quite expensive. $300 for my probation officer and another $600 or $700 in court costs and fines. Luckily I was able to pay it all of right away. If I hadn’t, I probably would have procrastinated and eventually forgotten about it, lol.

What Happened

This all started back in June of 2013 when I was pulled over by an Iowa State Trooper for supposedly following the vehicle in front of me too closely. I think that’s a pretty subjective thing, but I’m not well versed in traffic law, so whatever.

I realized I had a small amount of marijuana in the car, which I threw in an empty mcdonalds sack I had sitting in the front seat next to me. I never rolled the sack down, and that was my fatal error. I didn’t roll it down because I was expecting the trooper to approach my vehicle on the drivers side, not even thinking he’d go to the passenger side because he pulled me over on a busy highway in Des Moines.

Obviously, the state trooper saw the marijuana in the wide open bag and asked me what it was.

I replied, “It’s medicine”. To which he replied a quite firm, “No.”. It thought it was kinda amusing. I fessed up and he searched the car and all that jazz. Sat me in the front seat of his car and I immediately asked if I was going to jail. He assured me I wasn’t because nothing else was found in the car and it was my first offense.

Since this is my first community service sentence (and hopefully the last), are there any non-profits that need any web work done? I’d really like to do that for a non-profit. Or, even doing some manual labor outside would be great too, a nice change from being in an office all week. And I love the cold weather.

Also, the break from marijuana has been rather nice so far. The most notable thing I’ve noticed is an increase in ambition. Not just increased ambition in my work life, but in my personal life as well. I stil love some idle time here and there, but not like I used to. Now I just need to work on weaning myself off my pack a day Newport menthol’s habit. They’re so damn tasty, though.

If you’ve got any suggestions on non-profits who could benefit from some web development work, please leave a note in the comments or on Hacker News.

Tor is an extremely important tool for people living under oppressive governments. It allows them to get around the restrictions put in place on them, essentially allowing them access to the full, unfiltered Internet. Tor needs more relays/nodes to be more efficient and provide more bandwidth and speed for these users.

Tor is also used for illegitimate reasons, too, like torrents, all types of illegal network activity, and various other things. I believe the legit uses of Tor far outweigh the illegitimate uses.

If you can run a Tor relay/node, you should. It’s really easy to do, even on Windows.You don’t need to be an exit point, as exit points are subject to more scrutiny and usually violate most hosting provider’s TOS.

I used to run a Tor relay about a year ago but stopped, don’t even remember the reason.

After my two free months of DigitalOcean run out, it should cost me about $5/month to keep the droplet (DigitalOcean’s weird name for a vm) to use for small projects when needed, and to run as a dedicated tor relay.

If you can afford an extra $5/month, you should look into doing the same. It’s good to help when you can.

This post on Hacker News discusses developers (or whoever really) including their .git folder when pushing to their production site. Not something I’ve ever had an issue with given my workflow. The HN piece linked to an article where the author discovered that some of the top 100,000 Alexa sites were including a .git folder on their live, public facing site. One of those sites is run by the Federal Communications Commission.

To check to see if you’re including a .git folder, just navigate to yourdomain.com/.git/config. Taking a look at the FCC’s git config file, we can see that they’ve also got a GitHub account, named fcc-admin! It’s a private GitHub account, though.

Because their .git folder is there, we can also see when they push new code to the fcc.gov website, via the .git/logs/HEAD file. You can have a look at it here. I wouldn’t be surprised if they remove this folder before too long. So, I’ve created a public Gist containing the contents of their git config file and the HEAD log file for archival purposes.

Wow, this is fucking insane. Some Sherriff showed a bunch of school kids how to make meth basically. The say it’s part chemistry class, part drug enforcement. Yah, enforce drugs by making crank right in a damn school.

A local woman went ‘through the roof’ when a deputy took his anti-drug message to high school.

She says he showed students how to make methamphetamines, and she has the video to prove it.

Grays Harbor County sheriff’s deputy shows class, “And the reaction will start occurring down there and start bubbling up.”

It is part chemistry class and part drug enforcement as a member of the Grays Harbor drug task force talks to Elma High School students about making Methamphetamine.

Deputy shows class: “Then you’ll have a little bit down at the bottom, the white stuff, and that’s your meth.”

This guy must be insane. I’d flip out if he was teachin my kids that stuff. I hate tweekers and meth-heads. I’ve known too many and they’re all the same. Read the entire story here.